Tuesday, May 9, 2017

Putin Regime Now Entering Its Fifth and Final Phase, Yakovenko Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, May 9 – Vladimir Putin’s
regime, which has always been authoritarian and kleptocratic, nonetheless has
evolved over the course of the last 18 years through four stages and now is entering
its fifth and final one, according to Moscow commentator Igor Yakovenko (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5910CBCC3CA63).

The first period lasted from 1999 to
2003, having begun with the blowing up of apartment buildings and the start of
the second post-Soviet Chechen war, had as its “main event” the destruction of
independent mass media, something that allowed Putin to make the lie the basis
of his power, the commentator says.

The second period (2003-2007)
involved “the destruction of private property and the transformation of
corruption” into the key feature of the regime. That was accompanied by the “cleansing
of the political field” and remarks like “parliament is not a place for
discussion.”As in the first, “the world
didn’t understand anything” about what Putin represented.

The third period (2007-2014)
extended from the Munich speech to the Crimean Anschluss and aggression against
Ukraine. In this period, “the Putin regime ceased to be a problem of Russia
alone and become a problem of the entire world.” As a result there was a
partial return to the cold war and a search in the West for an explanation of
Putin’s behavior.

The fourth period, one of “an
imagined empire,” lasted from 2014 to 2016, from the Crimean Anschluss in 2014
to “a series of foreign policy failures of the end of 2016 and the beginning of
2017.Putin conducted “’wars for
television,’” and he promoted a series of “imperial myths” taken from the past
but projected on to the future.

During that period, Yakovenko points
out, “Russia was excluded from the g8 but with the help of television imagined
itself as a world empire.”The West “began
to understand that Putin’s Russia is the main threat for humanity” but “nevertheless
felt compelled to conduct negotiations” with it. After Brexit and the victory
of Donald Trump, Russian television shifted from the idea that “Crimea is ours”
to notion that “the world is ours.”

But then things began to go wrong,
the commentator says, and the Putin regime entered its fifth period. Trump
turned out to be something other than Putin expected. “The main hero of Brexit
by the name of Boris suddenly became the chief supporter of anti-Russian
sanctions.” And Russian military actions in Syria highlighted not Moscow’s
strength but its weakness.

Moreover, a series of developments
in Europe have shown that despite everything Russia can do in the propaganda
sphere, there are definite limits to its influence, given the realities that
ever more people in the West can see.Montenegro is now in NATO, and “the Balkans are lost for Putin.”

In Austria, the Kremlin’s preferred
candidate for president lost, thus “depriving Putin of support in Central
Europe.”The elections in the
Netherlands deprived Moscow of yet another supporter in Europe. And the French
elections served up a crushing defeat for Putin’s preferred candidate Marine Le
Pen. There is little reason to think Putin will win the German elections.

And according to Yakovenko, Putin
has even called particular attention to these losses by his support for his
defense minister Sergey Shoygu’s construction “for 20 billion rubles” of a
plywood Reichstag in a Moscow park so that Russian children could “storm” it.
Hardly an advertisement for Putin’s success.

In short, Putin’s Russia is in its
fifth and final stage. When it will end is as yet unclear, but that it will end
is certain because in so many ways, Putin’s regime recalls that of the Soviets
in the 1970s and 1980s, a time when what propagandists said and what people saw
diverged so much that the regime became unsupportable.